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Inside George W. Bush’s Closet

“It was a slap in the face.” Steven Levine is remembering that day in 2006 when President George W. Bush took the stage in a small-town school gym in Indiana. It was October 28, right before the midterm elections, and Levine was a 22-year-old White House advance aide. He’d been camped out in Sellersburg all week, working to get the details just right for Bush’s campaign rally. The flags hung just so, the big presidential seal on the podium. Then Bush started talking, his standard stump speech about taxes and supporting the troops. But a new applause line took Levine by surprise. “Just this week in New Jersey,” the president said, “another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage. We believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman, and should be defended. I will continue to appoint judges who strictly interpret the law and not legislate from the bench.”

He was gay and working for a Republican and convinced it was possible to be both at the same time.

Like dozens of other gay colleagues in the Bush White House, many of them closeted, Levine had been sure that Bush himself was personally tolerant even if the GOP was not—and uncomfortable with gay-bashing as a way to win elections. But this was a rebuff, and it was hard not to take it personally: “To be working extraordinarily hard with all of your energy, working through many nights for somebody that you believe in, and to hear that person that you work so hard for come out against something that you are.”

Levine knew, of course, that Bush had officially backed the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposed amendment to the Constitution to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman. But this was also the president who had made combating AIDS in Africa a personal cause (later, at Levine’s urging, he would even decorate the White House North Portico with a giant red ribbon to mark World AIDS Day), who had met with previously ostracized gay Republican leaders and whose hard-line conservative vice president had an openly gay daughter. And besides, opposing gay marriage just “wasn’t a centerpiece of the campaign to date,” Levine recalled when we talked recently. “So it wasn’t something that I was expecting to have been sort of his rallying cry at that event.”

Afterward, Levine made what small protest he could, telling his bosses he refused to work advance for future campaign events. Back in Washington, Levine says, “I told the folks in the [White House] advance office that I couldn’t do that anymore. … I told them why. These are my friends.”

“That was sort of my quiet way of objecting,” Levine recalls.

***

Levine stayed with Bush right upuntil the president hopped into the armored presidential limo for the ride to Barack Obama’s inauguration 27 months later. As the taillights disappeared down Pennsylvania Avenue, Levine left town. A few months later, one of his gay friends who had also worked in the White House sat down in front of Facebook and counted the Bush White House staffers he knew to be gay. He came up with at least 70 (only two of them women).

That number—and after speaking with two dozen sources I have no doubt it was an incomplete tally—has surprised almost everyone I’ve told. Alberto Gonzales, the former Bush White House counsel and attorney general, for example, says he never knew dozens of gays had served on the White House staff. “I don’t think I could identify more than one or two,” he told me. “It was just something that we didn’t talk about.”

Ben Baker/Redux Pictures

Scott Evertz was Bush’s openly gay AIDS czar. He told me he was entirely unaware he had company. “I, of course—just by the law of statistics—knew that there were other gay people in the White House,” he says. “But not a single one of them was out to me, so I felt completely alone.”

The broader political environment was, to say the least, hostile. When Evertz’s appointment was announced in 2001, the religious right was furious. On the fringe, Evertz recalls the late Fred Phelps—later known for offending everyone by picketing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq—calling for protesters to burn the flag of Wisconsin, where Evertz had been living, and publishing nasty posters on his church’s website referring to Evertz as “Bush’s butt buddy.” Once Evertz was ensconced in the Office of National AIDS Policy, he remembers, “People would come to my office, and they’d make appointments. And their sole purpose was to pray for me in my office.”

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Evertz says Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, for a time would only give him clearance for public appearances if he promised not to be billed as the first openly gay appointee in a Republican administration. With the politics swirling, Israel Hernandez, a deputy assistant to the president, came into Evertz’s office and gave him a hug. Evertz was sure Rove had sent him as a nice gesture. It was only much later that Evertz learned Hernandez, who had been with Bush since serving as his driver and personal aide in the early 1990s, was gay. The hug had been a quiet statement of support from a member of the White House’s gay underground.

“Did we have a lot of people in the closet in the administration?” says one former senior official in the Bush White House whose office included at least three gay staffers. “I used to say we had an entire warehouse.”

Gay Marriage, During and After Bush

Americans’ support for same-sex marriage dipped during the Bush administration but has since increased dramatically—even among Republicans.

Source: Pew Center

In recent months, I’ve reported extensively on life in the closet of the Bush White House, and a number of his former aides are quoted on the record in this story for the first time about their experiences as gay Republicans in an administration that was perhaps the last of the era when institutionalized discrimination against gays and lesbians was still legal, if increasingly frowned upon. Their accounts offer a time-capsule view of a Republican Party—and a president—at war with itself over an issue on which public opinion and the law have now changed dramatically. At the time, it seemed to be great politics for Bush: Coming out against gay marriage, as Rove bragged in his 2010 book, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, “benefited my candidate” and “helped reelect him” in 2004. But since a Supreme Court decision last year, 19 states and the District of Columbia have legalized gay marriage, just the outcome that Bush and his team fought to prevent, and a clear majority of Americans—a record high of 55 percent this year—now tell pollsters they support this right.

Timothy J. Burger, a former reporter for Bloomberg, Time and other publications, is a consultant in Washington, D.C. Follow him @BurgerInfo.